There has been a long felt need in the art for apparatus and methods which will permit a wide range of permutations and combinations of lens prescriptions in which substantially infinite varieties of base radius, cross radius, thickness, and prismatic effect are all intertwined by prescription over the recognized range of diopter measurements for ophthalmic lenses.
In addition to the obvious need for such methods and equipment, there is also a crying need in the art to provide grinding equipment which minimizes breakage of lens blanks and astygmatic defects.
Present day equipment is built and installed by experts. Unfortunately, the technicians who operate the equipment to produce prescription lenses are not uniformly as expert as the equipment designers.
With this variation in skill being the rule rather than the exception, present day equipment often produces lenses with untrue radii and unwanted prisms.
Other problems which are encountered in present day equipment are edge breakage, overheating causing breakage under impact tests; softening of lens cement on the lens blanks from high heat of friction, thereby forcing lenses off the mounting blocks and often jamming and damaging the machines as a result.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a new and novel optic lens generating method and apparatus.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a new and novel method and apparatus for generating optic lens surfaces utilizing toric type grinding means in conjunction with multiple families of base radius and cross radius templates which cooperate through a novel structure having multiple degrees of constrained movements which effectuate the generation of the desired optical surfaces.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a new and novel optic lens generating method and apparatus which can also be utilized to true up finishing laps which are related to respective families of surfaces to be generated.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a new and novel optic lens generating method and apparatus which can effectuate a prismatic effect such that the ground lens has a resulting prism in the proper position.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a new and novel lens generating apparatus in which magazines of templates are utilized to provide a wide range of permutations and combinations of lens prescriptions over the normal range of diopter measurements for prescription lenses.